In the fight against climate change, the next five-year term appears to be similar to the last chance. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has indeed left no doubt in its latest report, that maintaining a "livable world" implies drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions during this decade. However, neither of the two finalists in the presidential election is currently in a position to meet this challenge, according to NGOs and think tanks that have analyzed the programs. Neither Mr. Macron nor Ms. Le Pen have proposed sufficient measures to put France on the right track to meet its climate goals.
"None of the candidates is up to the task, but we cannot put them on the same level," said Morgane Créach, director of the Climate Action Network, which comprises 36 organizations. "Mr. Macron's program, which is imprecise and incomplete, makes us stagnate, whereas Ms. Le Pen's program, empty and dangerous, makes us go backwards." An analysis shared by Clément Sénéchal, Greenpeace France's climate spokesperson, who said he is "worried" about the next five years: "We have a choice between a climate cynic, who pretends to be in charge of the climate crisis but hides its real causes, namely neoliberal economics, and a climate skeptic, who conceals its magnitude and nature. So between bad and worse."
Under the next mandate, France will work on the first five-year programming law on energy and climate. There is an urgent need to straighten things out: Despite some progress, France, according to the High Council on Climate (Haut Conseil pour le climat), is not on track to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, as committed to in the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015. The courts have ordered it to take additional measures. It will have to accelerate even more now that the European Union has raised its 2030 ambitious targets.
'Consume better and less'
Although he considers that "never has so much been done for the environment" – a record that observers dispute – Mr. Macron acknowledges that "things are not going far enough." To "go faster," he proposes implementing "ecological planning," an idea borrowed from Jean-Luc Mélenchon (La France Insoumise, a left-wing populist political party), whose climate program was considered the most ambitious along with that of environmentalist Yannick Jadot. To transition away from fossil fuels, the president-candidate supports the construction of 14 EPRs (third generation pressurised water reactor design), as well as the deployment of solar and wind power at sea. He also wants to decarbonize industry through the France 2030 plan, and is banking on hydrogen and CO2 capture and storage.
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